Becoming pitch perfect

“Keep the emotion that you love your business alive, and the audience will love your business,” says Metin Yesilcimen, co-founder of JustMop, an online on-demand home cleaning service marketplace.

Along with the other co-founder, Kerem Kuyucu, Yesilcimen took part in a pitching workshop hosted by 500 Startups, in partnership with TOP and Nestle, at AstroLabs Dubai.

With approximately $175 million under management, the Silicon Valley-based global seed-stage fund and accelerator programme has funded more than 1,000 start-ups from around 50 countries. More than 20 of the funded start-ups are from the MENA region.

The fund’s increased focused on the Middle East was confirmed by Zafer Younis, a serial entrepreneur from Jordan and currently the Entrepreneur in Residence at 500 Startups, who conveyed to the attendees that they were eyeing more than 40 regional companies to invest in over the next two years.

It was more than enough to pique the interest of the 70 attending start-up founders.

However, only nine of them got the opportunity to directly pitch and receive instant feedback and live mentorship from Younis, joined by Mathew G Johnson, one of the fund’s partners, and Tammy Camp, ‘distribution hacker in residence’.

The event was held at the first Google Tech Hub Space in the region – created after Google, AstroLabs Dubai and the Dubai Multi Commodities Centre (DMCC) teamed up to support the region’s best technology start-ups.

Remembering Susan Wojcicki’s garage, where young Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google, the tech giant launched a celebration of its entrepreneurial roots in 2011 by initiating its Google For Entrepreneurs programme.

Since then, they have partnered with local entrepreneurs to set up campuses – ‘where entrepreneurs can learn, connect, and create companies that will change the world’ – in 125 countries across the world.

In 2014, they decided to add Dubai to this list and turned to two men who had already reached the entrepreneurial heights – Louis Lebbos and Muhammed Mekki, the co-founders of online fashion retailer Namshi.

A year earlier, the former McKinsey consultants had made the decision to pay it forward by sharing the lessons they had learnt. Since then, their venture, AstroLabs, has created a vibrant network of like-minded people to help small businesses grow through educational programmes and access to capital.

With the DMCC on board, the three entities’ membership-based co-working space has temporarily opened at Almas Tower in Jumeirah Lakes Towers, but will soon move to their new 6,500 square metre premises in the same locale.

The hub also houses an advanced mobile development lab, co-designed by Google, and offers a number of educational programmes for start-ups including the AstroLabs Academy and Scaling Online Startups programmes.

“We are focusing on the elements that are most important to scale, which is really around understanding how to acquire customers as cheaply as possible and how to maintain them and increase the customer lifetime value,” explains Mekki while talking to StartUp before the workshop.

“So we talk about the theory, but most importantly we are very practical.”

For its part, the DMCC streamlines the process of obtaining company licenses for the hub’s entrepreneurs at a subsidised rate which is incorporated in their monthly fee.

A number of other services are offered through their various partnerships.

“So we try to bring the best of services and support to the companies that are accepted in order to enable them to scale,” adds Mekki.

“That is really our goal – to help create the next wave of really scalable technology start-ups here.”

He also explains that out of 150 applications they have accepted only 35 so far.

“We are focused on companies that are coming here in order to be able to scale at least regionally and, hopefully, globally,” he says.

Obviously they are looking for the best of the best in order to keep up with their reputation – among around 100 start-ups from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Jordan, the AstroLabs team has already supported, are the success stories of Shahiya, Lebanon’s first exit from the region, and Dubai-based Careem.

“That’s one of the other elements that we take seriously which is [creating] a community and making sure that we are actually curating a community of doers,” Mekki says.

Part of this communit is JustMop. For Kuyucu this is his fourth venture. After climbing the corporate ladder to the position of co-director of the production team at Rocket Internet GmBH in Turkey, he moved to Qatar to foster the expansion of FoodOnClick, a Yemeksepeti affiliate, on behalf of the company.

Then followed the development of Carmudi, a car classifieds platform for both car buyers and sellers in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan and the UAE, before he accepted the offer of old university friend Yesilcimen, to join him in setting up and growing JustMop.

Coming up with the idea in August 2014, the beta version of their website was prepared in October, and by the end of last year they were accepted at AstroLabs.

“We were looking at couple of options, but we’ve found this one to have the leanest process of setting up and the fastest one, and financially it’s benefiting as well,” Yesilcimen says.

They both consider the start-up ecosystem in Dubai a close-knit community, but point out that their proven entrepreneurial backgrounds and connections have eased the process.

“So it’s kind of word of mouth and LinkedIn power,” explains Kuyucu.

“We tried everything to find the right partner, but the ecosystem, I think, needs a lot of enhancement. Now, you can’t just come to Dubai and set up your business and raise the investment in a couple of weeks.

“It needs improvement and AstroLabs is definitely doing it.”

A seasoned entrepreneur, Mekki has witnessed a radical change in the ecosystem from 2013 and expects Dubai to become a global hub for companies looking to access emerging markets.

Always keeping his eye on potentials for improvement, he suggests: “It’s the talent and development of that talent, the first-stage funding, and the final need is creating more of a dense community.

“That is why we’ve put AstroLabs the way we have which is about bringing together all the right pieces, all the right people, so that they can feed off of each other. That’s something that we still think is at the early stages, but it’s coming soon.”

After patiently listening to and advising entrepreneurs, Camp explains to StartUp: “At such early stages, we typically look at the market size and the team. Team is very important because we want somebody who is a go-getter, a hustler, somebody that is very smart, but the entire team has to be that way.

“We typically invest in companies with two or more co-founders. And it’s about their technology – are they really disrupting something?”

The disruptors of the local service providers market, Dunia Othman and Ibrahim Colak, co-founders of Mr. Usta, attended the event purely for learning purposes.

Joined by two partners, the husband and wife business duo founded Mr. Usta, an online business directory of local service providers, in early 2014. Early on, Colak quit his day job to fully commit to the development of their business.

The website has grown from 1,500 Ustas – local service providers registered on their platform – to 3,400 mainly organically. It hosts over 300 unique visitors per day and obtains a 40 percent conversion rate. A service rating system is also accessible through mobile devices and PCs.

Among many pieces of advice shared by 500 Startups representatives, Othman points out a few, starting with the difference between the paying customers and the users.

She says: “To understand that a customer is the one that gives you the money and the user is the one that will use the service. Sometimes they are the same, sometimes they are not.

“Also, many of us asked how to predict how much revenue we could make at the start of our business especially when pitching to investors. The response was to look at what the similar ideas in a different country or in a different industry are to be able to make and project from there.”

Having bootstrapped their business, Kuyucu and Yesilcimen say that they now have “three term sheets on the table” which required a lot of pitching to get to that point.

“My practical advice would be just pitch as much as possible, never feel like you’re going to be insufficient, practice is going to make it perfect,” says Kuyucu.

Mekki explains that he has noticed an improvement among the quality of pitches being presented at the hub, adding that “getting direct feedback is essential to hone your skill”.

“It’s a talent that you’re not just born with to be able to do it well,” he says.

“One of the arts of pitching is to distill the message into a very sequential delivery for it to get to the point early.

“And a lot of start-ups have a hard time encapsulating the concept in a quick and easy to understand way because they are so engrossed in their idea. I would say that’s one of the major challenges.”

With both Mr.Usta and JustMop being trust-based businesses, the founders agree that word of mouth marketing is crucial for their businesses in Dubai.

Othman adds that in spite of their tight marketing budget, their marketing efforts, which are mainly in SEO and social media, have secured a 30 percent traction quarter-on-quarter.

“On the social front what we found beneficial is posting helpful DIY videos, pictures, and blogs,” she says.

“Examples are ‘A guide to installing a satellite dish’ or ‘Moving with children’. Some of our Facebook posts are reaching over 100,000 users and we are seeing over 10 percent engagement on the posts, which is helping us build brand awareness.”

Having advised numerous entrepreneurs on how to achieve their traction-related targets, Camp explains that having analytics and email set up before they turn on their paid acquisition channels are fundamental for any start-up.

“To have their analytics set up knowing what to measure and how to measure it and then turn on your paid acquisition channels such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, and things like that,” she concludes.

“And I’m pretty bullish on email. So having really good email infrastructure set up [is important].”